Ramin Sayar (CEO) and Christian Beedgen (CTO & Co-Founder)
Congrats to Ramin, Christian and the entire Sumo Logic team on their IPO (Nasdaq: SUMO).
Over the past decade, Sumo has established itself as the leader in continuous intelligence. With a cloud-native platform, Sumo has redefined the scale, elasticity and reliability of security, business and operational intelligence. We are excited for the next phase of their journey.
Our partnership with Sumo Logic began in 2009, at a time when on-premise log management and analytics were the industry standard. But there was a growing realization that continuous intelligence delivered in the cloud at massive scale was the path forward. Seeing the potential, we began searching for promising founders who shared a vision for the opportunity ahead. We were fortunate to be introduced to an exceptionally accomplished technology leader named Christian Beedgen, who was the Chief Architect at ArcSight at the time. From the very first meeting over a whiteboarding lunch at Greylock, we immediately felt a strong connection with Christian. That personal spark and mutual excitement over the potential of the cloud to reinvent the industry led to Sumo Logic.
Christian and co-founder Kumar Saurabh initiated the company with Greylock, and we led the company’s initial funding of $5.8 million in April 2010. The initial pitch deck shows how prescient the founding vision was.
The company had to quickly come up with a name in order to receive it’s initial funding, so they chose “Sumo” (after Christian’s dog) as a placeholder. Sumo’s ambitious, forward-thinking vision attracted an experienced founding team with strong domain expertise, including founding VP of Product and Strategy Bruno Kurtic and Chief Architect Stefan Zier. As the early team grew quickly, Sumo wrestler dolls began appearing around the office, and the beloved name was soon made permanent.
Throughout our partnership with Sumo Logic, we have admired their steadfast commitment to delivering continuous intelligence at scale. In the early days, many large enterprises requested an on-premise version of Sumo’s platform, but the team stayed true to their vision and focused on where the puck was headed – cloud scale analytics. From those humble beginnings, it’s amazing to see the platform today which scans more than 870 petabytes of data per day. That’s what continuous intelligence at scale is all about.
Initial customers who were bold to take the bet on an unknown startup included Roblox, Limelight, Ooyala, and Case Western, and today the company is proud to partner with many of the world’s leading companies including Alaska Airlines, Brown University, JetBlue, Major League Baseball, Netflix, PagerDuty, Petco, Pitney Bowes, Qualtrics, Salesforce.com, Twilio, and ULTA Beauty.
In December 2014, the company was fortunate to have Ramin Sayar join as CEO. Ramin is an outstanding business strategist and operational leader – he was formerly a senior executive at VMware and HP – and he immediately saw Sumo’s large potential. With Ramin’s leadership, the company has grown from startup to public company.
And we are thankful for our investment partners that joined in supporting the company starting with Shlomo Kramer and Sutter Hill who joined Sumo as early investors, as well as Accel, Sequoia, IVP, DFJ, Glynn Capital, Battery, Sapphire, Allen and Co., and others.
We are privileged to have been a part of Sumo Logic’s story since the very beginning and look forward to continuing our partnership going forward. While the public market debut marks a key milestone and validates the company’s early cloud thesis, Sumo is just getting started on it’s journey to deliver continuous intelligence.
